Silvana Malta Group: Cravo e Canela

"Bossa Nova can be compared to making love," asserts Brazil's Silvana Malta. "Once you start off, everything is easy—instinctively you know what to do. You must listen to each other and pay attention to which direction the other musicians choose. The art is to swing in the silence." Now based in Denmark and touring throughout Europe, Malta leads a band of Denmark's top interpreters of samba, as well as some of the Brazilian musicians she worked for in her youth. With songs like "Feitiço da Vila," "Sentado a Beira do Caminho," '"Quando te Vi" (a striking Latin version of "Till There Was You" from The Music Man), Cravo e Canela is a mellow sampling of Brazilian joie de vivre.